Mr. Stevens' Secretary by Frances Schenkkan, and: The Poet in the Park: Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Park by Judith Lauter (review)

After studying the poems, essays, adages, letters, biographies, and reminiscences, what does one really know about the Wallace Stevens who claimed "Poetry is not personal" (CPP 902)? Frances Schenkkan's recent collection of poems, Mr. Stevens' Secretary, approaches this question from the perspective of a secretary staffing his desk at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, someone who observes him daily but, like us, still considers him a puzzle. Like Hester Baldwin and Marguerite Flynn, the two secretaries documented in Peter Brazeau's oral biography Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, this persona spends her working hours typing business and personal correspondence, taking calls and dictation, and deciphering words on scraps of paper left on her desk as her boss transitions from poet-walking-in-the-park to executive-at-the-office. The fiction that Schenkkan fashions is neither Baldwin nor Flynn, but may contain aspects of both: she is a Southerner, embarrassed by her accent, who maintains the low profile of a stenographer, as seems true of Flynn, but she has a turbulent inner life, perhaps closer to Baldwin, who Flynn said "had a temper of her own" (Brazeau 33) and who Richard Sunbury called "a humdinger" unafraid to correct Stevens's grammar, or "tell him when he was wrong" (Brazeau 39).

Given their daily proximity, this secretary observes facets of Stevens's enigmatic personality that others would have missed. She hears the emotion in his voice, for example, and empathizes with his domestic sadness

        when he was on the phone to Hollyor perhaps it was Mrs. Stevenshe was talking to, a woman anyway.A woman could bring him close to tears.

("Mr. Stevens' Voice" 43–44)

On the clock, this secretary savors her almost anonymous intimacy with her aloof boss. She transcribes his words and scrutinizes his silences. She notices little things, like when Stevens exchanges a brown hatband for a black one, and she assumes someone must have died:

        His brother Garrett?She mailed a check to him the first of each month.Mr. Stevens had said nothing. He wouldn't

and no use re-reading the lines of poetryhe gave her to type. The few details—two pears, a bowl of carnations—tell her little.

("Mr. Stevens' Hat Band" 8)

When Stevens asks her one "morning at her desk, / Do you read poetry?" she confesses that she does, then later wishes she'd said, "Marianne Moore," instead of "Edna St. Vincent Millay," whose poems are "all passion." And then there are things that, like Stevens, she chooses not to reveal—"Her own poems are nothing like theirs. / Not that she'd mention it. / Not that he'd ask" ("Mr. Stevens Inquires about Her Poetic Interests" 21).

Indeed, we come to know more about Stevens's secretary than he does: that she sees a psychiatrist, for instance, has marriage troubles, fears madness, writes poems, and left the provincial South to come North to this "godforsaken city," where there is "Not a watermelon . . . worth spit," because of her husband's new job ("Mr. and Mrs." 3). Her other bosses were an uncle, her pastor, a sexual harasser, and a kindly Mr. Rubenstein whose gift of lace gloves she keeps wrapped in tissue. But it is the austere man whose favored pronoun is "one"—which "fits Mr. Stevens to a T. No 'I' for him" ("A Silence So Huge, There is No 'I'" 7)—who most intrigues and attracts her:

For none of the others has she turned a scrawled itsinto it's almost daily. None brought in roses,cream, deep pink, wrapped in damp newspaper.From Mrs. Stevens, he said, for my desk.

("Before Mr. Stevens" 4)

These roses, a gift for her desk, were probably as much for Stevens's pleasure as for hers, and one suspects they may...